


wrong turn at Casablanca

by janie_tangerine



Category: Sirens (UK)
Genre: Huddling For Warmth, Humor, Idiots in Love, Lethal Highway, M/M, Stuart is Ash's I.C.E.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2015-06-25
Packaged: 2018-04-06 02:29:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4204581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/pseuds/janie_tangerine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>wherein Ash and Stuart go with Rachid to visit his family and they get stranded in the desert.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wrong turn at Casablanca

**Author's Note:**

  * For [edwardcourtenay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edwardcourtenay/gifts).



> this was a birthday fic written like two years ago and I was going through stuff on my tumblr I hadn't reposted on Ao3, saw that it was there and I figured it was high time I did. Basically the prompt was 'they're in Morocco going to the wedding of one of Rachid's cousins and they end up lost in the middle of the desert because Stuart gets the wrong turn and they don't have GPS'. If you're looking for serious this is not the right place. I don't remember where the hell I stole the title from but I'm pretty sure it was a wordplay on some movie title. Also nothing belongs to me and I miss this damned show.

“Mate, just do everyone a favor and admit that we’re lost, on top of your driving sucking ass.”

Stuart snorts and turns left. “We’re  _not_  bloody lost. This should –”

“Not to rain on your parade, but we’ve turned by this place at least twice by now,” Rachid interrupts from the backseat, and Stuart doesn’t really want to admit that both him and Ash are right and that they’re, in fact,  _lost_ , but… fine. Maybe he should have brought a map instead of trying to memorize the road between Casablanca and the-place-whose-name-he-can’t-pronounce-where-Rachid’s-family-lives. Then again he always was good at remembering directions, but – okay, it was back home, not in bloody Morocco.

For the umpteenth time, he tries to remember  _why_  did he ever say yes when Rachid mentioned going to visit the part of his family still living in Morocco because one of his cousins is getting married and asked both he and Ash to come, because he’d be delighted if they would. Ash had relented after not too long even if he keeps on muttering that he hopes no one finds out he doesn’t like girls unless he wants to end up in jail, and Stuart – well, it had seemed just rude to refuse Rachid when he seemed to  _really_  want the two of them to be there. So they went, except that Rachid’s family doesn’t live anywhere near an airport, and so they rented a car, and Stuart refused to let anyone else drive on account that he had studied the maps and didn’t trust either of them with it.

Maybe he should have timed that better. Or relented and brought a GPS or  _something_ , because right, fine, he has no clue of where they ended up.

“Couldn’t you have paid attention to the road, since you’re the only one who’s been here already?”

“You said you had it covered, I figured I could just take a nap for once.”

“Guys, why don’t we worry about the real problem here?” Ash asks, interrupting the banter before it can escalate.

“Which would be?” Stuart answers. “We might be lost, but –”

“It’s six in the evening and it’s fucking  _December_ , do you think we’re going to have sunlight for long? And if you remember your basic geography from elementary school, you’d know that in the desert it’s  _cold_  at night. I also don’t see any civilized town anywhere near and if we keep on driving through the night, I can bet we’ll find out that we crossed into fucking Algeria in the morning.”

Well, shit. That’s… also a good point.

“That’s easily solved, though,” Rachid says.

“How exactly?” Stuart asks.

“Well, there are blankets in the trunk. The backseat is big enough for three. Surely we won’t freeze to death, will we? Unless you two have a problem.”

“Rachid,  _I_  don’t think I’m going to have a problem with that out of everything. But if anyone finds the three of us like  _that_ , you explain them there’s no orgy going on.”

Stuart thinks that he wants to throw up his lunch, but it’s not like he has much choice. Also it’s  _his_ fault that they ended up stranded in the middle of the bloody desert, so it’s not like he can complain now, can he?

“Fine by me,” he sighs.

It’s going to be a long night.

–

They park just outside the highway – Rachid assures them that they’re not going to get fined and no one ever checks anyway, and Stuart swears to himself he’s never going to ever make fun of Ash again for having brought already packed food that might last for two days. He might have cracked a joke or two about how much of a fifties’ housewife thing it was, but if Ash hadn’t they’d be stranded and dinner-less. Rachid  _did_  try calling his cousins to ask for directions and to tell them that they’d be late, but his cellphone has exhausted his credit, Ash is without credit too and Stuart’s has almost no battery but none of that was going to be a problem, because Rachid said  _his_  would work.

Sure.

By the time he’s eaten his sandwich and drank some water, it’s already dark and  _fucking freezing._ So the three of them don’t waste too much time going in the backseat – Rachid already fished the blankets out of the trunk, and he’s passing them over in the darkness when the incident happens.

“Oh, fuck,” Ash says just after Stuart hears the sound of something dropping on the ground.

“What?”

“That was my cellphone.”

“Whatever, you can grab it back tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, but it had the alarm set at four AM. Which was the time I needed to get up to catch the plane. Do you want to wake up at that time tomorrow?”

“Fuck  _no._  Right, I’m just gonna call you and hope that it doesn’t kill what battery I have left.”

“Wait –” Ash says, but Stuart doesn’t even pay attention and grabs his own phone, calling Ash. Sure enough, it rings a moment later.

It’s also right next to Stuart’s feet and Stuart reaches down to grab it, cursing as the blanket tangles between his feet. He doesn’t see Ash trying to reach for it before him, but he’s too far.

Stuart grabs the phone and sees  _I.C.E._  flashing across the screen.

“Bloody hell,  _seriously_?” Stuart asks as Ash maybe flushes red (it’s dark and the only light comes from the screen anyway) and grabs the phone back. Not fast enough that Rachid doesn’t see, though.

“Oh,  _really_? You hadn’t told me!” Rachid says, slapping Ash on the back. “Not exactly who I’d pick, but I suppose you know him better than I do.”

“I hadn’t told  _anyone_ ,” Ash mutters, sounding completely mortified.  “And if we have to talk about this, can it be in the bloody morning?”

“Fine,” Stuart agrees at once, figuring that it’s the best way to actually not talk about it – except that Rachid apparently thinks it’s hilarious because he can hear him giggling from the other side of the car for the next few minutes. Then he starts snoring. Well, better than giggling, Stuart decides.

Except that it’s a tight fit and being closely pressed to Ash’s side isn’t doing anything to make  _him_ feel like sleeping.

It’s making him feel as if he’s been kind of an arse, though. It had surprised him, sure, but – mostly because he can’t believe that Ash might think that much of him. Christ,  _he_ ’s the person Ash would want to hold his hand and shit when he’s in need of an emergency contact?  _He_  wouldn’t want to be his own emergency contact for sure. But still, he has been an arse about it. Especially when Ash is one of the three people on the face of the planet who actually doesn’t outright hate him. Well. It can’t be just that or he wouldn’t be his I.C.E. now, would he?

Rachid is still snoring away.

Okay then – can’t get more awkward than it is already.

“Ash?” he asks, keeping his voice down. He knows Ash isn’t sleeping – he’s not breathing the way someone does when they sleep.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” he huffs, hoping that it doesn’t sound as if he doesn’t mean it.

“ _What_?”

“I’m  _sorry_ , okay? I was a jerk about it. I just wouldn’t have ever suspected it’d be  _me_.”

He can feel Ash getting a fraction less tense at that. At least.

“You know, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Right. What’s the point then?”

“Come on, you remember that speech you gave me. Your I.C.E. is the person you want to hold your hand when you’re in a hospital bed and all that. My own mother would think I’m the worst candidate in the fucking world for that.”

“Sounds to me like you’ve taken after her in the being a poor judge of character department,” Ash huffs, turning a bit – Stuart thinks that they might be facing each other but he really can’t see shit right now.

“Christ, you’re serious.”

“You  _are_  my emergency contact, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, sure, and –  _oh._ ”

“Shit, you remembered that part. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

Considering that Stuart has just thought about Ash telling him that his I.C.E. wasn’t someone he’d have wanted to fuck, he’s pretty sure they’re discussing the same thing.

He would address the obvious discrepancy between  _that_  and Ash thinking that your emergency contact is supposed to hold your hand in a state of distress, but then he stops dead in his tracks because  _maybe_  he has it.

If he has it, then he should probably avoid opening another can of worms. Except that when in his entire life he ever could  _not_  open a can of worms if he had the chance?

“Bear with me a second. You said someone you wouldn’t  _fuck._  Which is – well. Kind of what you do all the time since I don’t think I’ve ever seen you having the, y'know, holding hands kind of relationship.”

“Seems like you suck at judging  _just_  your own character then.”

That wasn’t a no.

“So you – oh. Oh. Well. Really?”

… that was not exactly eloquent. But Ash goes slightly tense all over again so he probably got the gist of of it.

“Listen, if it makes you uncomfortable we can just pretend this conversation never happened. Really. I’m not going to take it personally. I mean, I’ve always known you don’t swing that way, so it’s not like it’s going to change anything.”

Tempting offer, Stuart thinks, except that he’s… not entirely sure he wants to take up on it.

Which is a thought that had never occurred to him before, and clearly  _now_  is exactly the Worst Possible Moment Ever for him to realize that while he doesn’t swing that way, he  _might_  consider it for Ash, and  _that_  should make him run for the hills (or dunes, in this case), except that for some reason he feels like doing exactly the contrary.

Not that he hadn’t ever thought that Ash  _was_  an attractive guy, from a purely objective point of view, but he never let himself go much farther down that road – mostly because he couldn’t see how anything good would lie there in the first place.

“What if I’m not too sure about pretending this conversation never took place?”

“ _What_?”

“Do I really have to say it twice?”

“Do you even know what you just implied? Because I’m not sure you do.”

“I think I know,” Stuart says instead. He spares a second to feel thankful that Rachid is still snoring softly and takes advantage of the utter lack of space between him and Ash to move just slightly forward.

Clearly his eyes hadn’t been adjusted to the dark enough and his lips end up on the corner of Ash’s mouth and not where they were supposed to, but – it doesn’t feel too weird. Or strange. Or – okay, it’s not like kissing a girl on the corner of her mouth, too, but it’s nowhere near repulsing either. All the contrary, actually.

“Seriously?” Ash breathes against his mouth.

“How about we take a rain check on this until we’re back where we won’t get arrested if anyone sees us and see how it goes?”

“You – you  _do_  realize what I meant when I said I wasn’t interested in fucking. Not with you, at least.”

“Guess what, I’m not interested in  _that_  either. I think we’ve both done enough of it to know the difference, didn’t we?”

“My bloody luck that it happens  _here_ ,” Ash mutters before letting his head fall on Stuart’s shoulder. Nothing that couldn’t be justified by the circumstances.

“Why, when does it ever go smooth for us?”

“Point taken,” Ash says against his neck, and fuck but this is a lot nicer than he ever thought it could feel.

–

“Oh, then I  _did_  bring it along!” Rachid says cheerfully the morning after while rustling in the trunk.

“You brought  _what_  along?” Ash asks while Stuart has to stop himself from straightening out his hair with his fingers.

“I couldn’t remember if I packed it, but I figured that checking wouldn’t hurt,” he says before taking a GPS navigator out of the trunk. Fully functioning, apparently.

“So we’ve had that all this time and  _you weren’t sure you brought it along?_ ”

Rachid shrugs and turns it on. He fiddles with it for a moment, then shrugs, still looking pretty much optimistic for the situation. “Hey, not too bad. We’re only… fifty kilometers off the turn we should have taken yesterday at noon.”

“You know what, let’s just forget it. But since you were the one forgetting it yesterday, you can drive now. I’ll go in the back.”

“ _He_  drives? After you? God, I’m never going to get to this wedding alive, am I?” Ash sighs, but then again he’s not volunteering for driving duty either.

“Look at how generous you are,” Rachid sighs, but goes towards the driver’s seat and doesn’t ask why both Stuart and Ash didn’t even try to make fun of the situation. Well, Stuart won’t be the one pointing it out.

He goes in the backseat and spends the next hour or so meeting Ash’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and shit but he’s nowhere near sure that they’ll manage to spend the next week without even kissing for real. Maybe if they actually get a room to themselves and if they’re very,  _very_  quiet…

As he thinks that, Rachid’s phone beeps – he stops by the side of the road to read the text he just got.

“Oh, that’s my uncle. He says that they finally figured out the rooms.”

“And?” Ash asks, sounding mildly hopeful. So Stuart wasn’t the only one thinking about  _that._

“Well, there’s more people around than they thought, but you were lucky. You’re bunking with his two daughters – they’re like, six and nine. Or something like that. Not a problem, right? Because otherwise you’d end up with… some five other people.”

“That’s fine,” Ash says, and Stuart can hear the suppressed groan in his voice. Their eyes meet in the rearview mirror again – they both look some halfway between resigned and frustrated.

It’s going to be a bloody long week, that’s for sure.

 

End.


End file.
